How do the authors effectively create suspense, fear, tension in the ghost stories "The Signal-Man" by Dickens and "The Red Room" by H. G. Wells?

Dickens and  Wells use surprisingly similar literary
techniques in writing "The Signal-Man" and "The Red Room," respectively. As any skilled
author does, each begins in the opening paragraphs to build suspense, fear, and tension.
To establish suspense, Dickens and Wells both open in href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/284369/in-medias-res">medias
res, a Latin term meaning "in the midst of things." Both stories
are told from the point of view of a first person protagonist who is knee-deep, as they
say, is some unusual situation that isn't explained to us at all: Why is Dickens' hero
standing atop a sheer bluff and climbing down to a railroad track below? Why is Wells'
hero in a strange, seemingly remote inn operated by even stranger people and asking them
for occupancy of the Red Room? The narrator tells us precisely what is happening before
him at any moment with no explanation of what may have led up to it or precipitated or
provoked it. As a result, we begin the story with nothing but suspenseful
questions.

Suspense is enhanced by the ominousness of
having remarks, reactions, and behavior go unexplained as when Dickens writes there was
one reaction of "such expectation and watchfulness that I stopped a moment, wondering at
it," and as when Wells writes, "The three of them made me feel uncomfortable with their
... unfriendliness to me." Fear adds to this building suspense and is created by both
authors through vocabulary and description. Dickens and Wells both uses words with
negative overtones or unpleasant hints of danger along with gruesome or chilling
descriptions. In terms of vocabulary, Dickens writes,

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foreshortened and shadowed, down in the deep
trench,
steeped in the glow of an angry
sunset,

The vocabulary to
note consists of words like foreshortened, shadowed, deep trench, steeped,
angry sunset. The vocabulary that Wells uses is represented by words like
faint step, stick, shambling step, creaked in this
quote:

I heard
the faint sound of a stick and a shambling step on the flags in the passage outside. The
door creaked on it's hinges
....

Descriptions that add to
feelings of fear are ones such as Dickens uses to describe the setting down by the
track,

crooked
prolongation of this great
dungeon

and such as Wells
uses to describe one of the three people at the inn:

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lower lip, half averted, hung pale and pink from
his decaying yellow
teeth

Each author builds
tension through different techniques. One example is that Dickens uses
disassociation--as in ghostly disassociation from the bodily realm--in statements like:
"When he heard a voice thus calling to him." Writing “a voice” instead of “my voice’
disassociates the voice from anything human. In contrast, Wells uses ominous repetitions
that force attention to suspenseful points of the story such as those repeated lines in
the beginning of the story:

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"This night of all nights!" whispered the old
woman.
"It's your own choosing," said the man with the withered
arm.